Description
William Bradford’s deluxe volume The Arctic Regions (1873) is often cited as an exemplar of Victorian publishing on polar subjects. Illustrated with hand pasted photographs and bound in sumptuous gilt leather, the publication was the professed outcome of a self-conscious “art expedition to Greenland”. As a prominent photographic book of the mid-Victorian period, produced by an American painter for a trans-Atlantic clientele, this album merits deserved critical attention for its visual and textual representations of the Arctic.This paper will examine The Arctic Regions alongside an unpublished album held in the National Library of Scotland, which highlights the scientific and personal networks of knowledge exchange that informed the final publication. In particular, contra the artistic credentials emphasised in the publication, this talk highlights the contestation of meaning apparent in a personal album gifted by the artist to the Scottish polymath John Francis Campbell of Islay. Among his many accomplishments, Campbell’s studies of glacial formation and Arctic geology in northern Scandinavia and Labrador were well known in Victorian Britain. Far from the rhetoric of an unchanging ‘frozen’ landscape, his accounts promoted a notion of the polar environment as dynamic and volatile. Paying particular attention to the inscriptions written around the photographs’ margins by Bradford and Campbell, apparently added in conversation with one another, I intend to highlight the unstable meanings and evidential uncertainties which could accrue to photographs of the Arctic.
| Period | 17 Jun 2011 |
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| Event title | Conference Paper, 'Revisiting Arctic Regions.' Polar Visual Culture: An International Conference, University of St Andrews, St Andrews |
| Event type | Other |
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